Of all the athletic programs at Old Dominion University, none has seen the improvement in the NCAA's all-important APR scores than the Monarch football program. And that's no coincidence.
In large part because it was a startup program that began in 2009, and then began the transition to the Football Bowl Division in 2013, its scores lagged behind the competition. New programs and those in transition tend to lose players, and that dampens APR rankings.
ODU's first APR score of 896 in the 2009-10 academic year was anemic, if understandable.
But it has slowly risen almost every season since to the point where in 2018-19, the most recent year for which APR scores were released, ODU had a much-improved score of 961, one that is finally beginning to truly reflect the program's true academic prowess.